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“Yes.”
“Really, Em? Or are you here to exact sweet revenge on the guy who hurt you three years ago?”
My throat squeezes tight. “No, Josh.”
“No?” He picks up the pages of the manuscript I’d been editing with my red pen. “How can you say no when it’s all right here in black, white and red?”
“It’s not what you think.”
“Yeah, you keep saying that.” He rakes a shaky hand through his hair. “What a coincidence that your hero’s name is Josh.”
“It’s just…I guess maybe it’s a little about you, about what happened to us years ago.”
“Wow,” he blurts out. “I guess now I know why you lied and said you were here for your thesis.”
“I didn’t want to tell you?—”
“Right, because if I knew this weekend was about payback and revenge, I would have ruined it for you.” The shakiness in his voice reverberates through me and slices into my heart. How can he think I’d do something like this? Does he not know me at all? I try to speak, but my words are stuck in my throat. “If I’d known, I wouldn’t have broken my abstinence rule before a series playoffs game and slept with you,” he adds. He goes quiet for a long moment, and my mind races. How can I make this right? He snorts. “You knew I was going to be here, didn’t you? None of this meeting was a coincidence.”
My God, he really thinks I went to such great lengths to get payback.
I throw my legs over the bed, and his gaze drops to my naked body. I quickly scramble to my suitcase and pull out a pair of shorts and T-shirt. He sits in silence as I dress. “Josh, if I can just explain.”
“Explain that you were out to hurt me? That you hate me so much you actually had sex with me to keep me from being at the top of my performance in a crucial game?”
My heart sinks into my stomach. “Is that what you think of me?”
He stares at me long and hard. “I’m sorry about the past, Em. I’m so fucking sorry.” I glance down and he groans. “I thought this weekend…. I thought I was making it right, and this…” He shakes a few sheets of paper.
“How much did you read?”
“Enough to know what’s really going on here.”
“No, you don’t because you didn’t read the ending.”
“There was no ending.”
“That’s because it’s not finished. Just like we’re not finished.” I remember what Susan said: Now it’s your chance to write your own ending.
“Of course, it’s not finished. You needed to hurt me, and then see how it all plays out before you could write it.”
I stand. “It’s romance, Josh. Romance stories have happily ever afters. Always.”
His brow pulls tight with confusion all over his face, and he wags his finger back and forth between the two of us. “Not this story.” He stands. “What we did before, and now…” He stares at the unmade bed. “…was obviously another mistake.”
Those old painful words cut twice as deep as last time. I stare at him and try to breathe through the ache in my chest. I love this man. I love him with everything in me, yet he thinks I’m capable of such cruelty. Tears pool in my eyes and instead of running to me and brushing them away like he had that night in my brother’s room, he just stands there hovering, battling with his own emotions.
“I didn’t tell you I was writing a romance because no one takes it seriously,” I explain in a last-ditch effort to show him this isn’t what he thinks, and that while a part of the book was about us, a big part was also fiction: a revenge trope. Which was never part of my plan with Josh.
“You didn’t think I’d take it seriously or support it?” he asks, the hurt on his face slicing my heart into tiny pieces. “I kind of remember saying I had respect for romance writers.”
Okay, I’m not making my situation any better here, or proving I wasn’t out for revenge, and I guess in a way I can see why he thinks this is all about him.
He pulls the paper coffee cups from the corrugated cardboard tray and hands one to me. “This is for you. It was nice knowing you, Ember.” He turns, and walks out the door. I’d say he was taking my heart with him, but that would be a lie. He’s had it with him since he walked away from me three years ago.
The door slams with a bang, and the tears fall down my face until the room blurs around me. My phone pings, a reminder that I have a session in thirty minutes. How can I walk into a room of professionals after having my heart torn from my chest, leaving nothing but a gaping hole? All I want to do is crawl back into my bed and stay there until the weekend is over. I flop down, deciding to do that, and the warm scent of Josh on the pillow has me sitting back up.
God, I can’t stay in this room where we made love all night long. Needing an escape, I take a fast shower, washing last night from my skin as I work to get my tears under control. Once done, I put on a pretty dress, grab my laptop and take one last glance at my printed manuscript before walking out the door. It locks behind me and I shake my head.
